As Mark St. Pierre's lawyer approached the completion of his cross-examination of Greg Meffert, he started to turn up the heat on the government's star witness in St. Pierre's bribery trial.

John McCusker, The Times-PicayuneGreg Meffert arrives at the federal courthouse in New Orleans.

Defense attorney Eddie Castaing questioned Meffert's testimony from Wednesday that he gave a credit card from St. Pierre's firm NetMethods to then-Mayor Ray Nagin's secretary, so she could use it to pay for the Nagin family's plane tickets to Hawaii in December 2004.

Meffert says the credit card was one of the main ways St. Pierre paid him kickbacks for the city work he had provided to St. Pierre's other companies, Imagine Software and Veracent.

"You were willing to show this ... to a third person who has no duty to protect you or anybody else?" Castaing asked Meffert incredulously.

Meffert gave a feeble answer about how, early on, when he was using the NetMethods credit card to pay for the mayor's trip to Hawaii, "we were pretty full of ourselves and we did a lot of reckless things."

But Castaing sought to cast doubt on Meffert's testimony that the credit card was designed to cover up his "criminal enterprise" with St. Pierre.

"You're treating this card like you have nothing to hide," Castaing said.

At several points during the trial, Castaing has questioned why, if a cover-up was going on, more of St. Pierre's payments weren't made in cash. Instead, nearly every payment to Meffert was via credit card or check, with a clear paper trail.

Similarly, Castaing pressed Meffert about his contention that St. Pierre paid him the majority of the alleged kickback money, about $450,000 of $860,000, after Meffert left City Hall -- after he no longer controlled city payments to St. Pierre.

Meffert has repeatedly testified that he and St. Pierre had a falling out shortly after Meffert left City Hall in July 2006. And yet, St. Pierre kept paying Meffert for nearly a year, at a whopping rate of $500 an hour for consulting services Meffert said he never performed.

Meffert testified he still had some influence at City Hall after his departure, but couldn't direct payments and contracts anymore. But Aaron Bennett, owner of a company that acted as a pass-through to pay St. Pierre in early 2007, has told The Times-Picayune that Meffert actually did retain substantial control at City Hall. For instance, Bennett said that on a private plane ride they all took from Chicago to Las Vegas in January 2007, Meffert told the mayor whom to hire as the new city tech chief, more than six months after Meffert left his city post.

Still, that didn't come out in testimony, and Castaing questioned the idea that St. Pierre had to keep paying Meffert once he was back in the private sector. Meffert admitted he wasn't going to be able to sue St. Pierre if he stopped paying on their consulting contract because the arrangement itself wasn't legal. But Meffert contended that St. Pierre's fate was "intertwined" with his and that's what compelled him to keep paying.

"But what hammer did you have over his head?" Castaing asked.

"In the end, we both had the same hammer over each other's head: Having this thing finish out and then move on," Meffert said.

"So that's worth $450,000? To finish out and move on?" Castaing asked. "Do you know how that sounds to people?"